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Evening is too loud for Nora until a small glowing petal leads her into the Night Garden. Guided by a hush-bird and an old willow, she gathers the scattered pieces of a lost lullaby — a breath, a kindness, a remembered smile — and begins to mend the quiet around her pillow.
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Nora did not feel sleepy the way the word should feel — soft, drowsy, like a hand on the back of your neck. Night was meant to fold her like a small blanket, but tonight it sat like a big empty room around her. Her blanket was tucked in neat and warm, the way her mother folded the corner just so, and Moss, her gray stuffed rabbit, lay heavy and familiar at her shoulder. The lamp had already been kissed off; a half page of the picture book they’d read together peeped from the bedside table. The moon made a quiet coin of light on the curtains. Everything looked exactly as it should, but still her thoughts bounced, light as skipping stones but louder than any stone had any right to be.
She replayed the day like a string of small beads. At breakfast she had spilled a little milk and her father had laughed and helped her wipe it away. At school she had colored a very long snake that took up the whole page and her friend had said, "That’s really long," which felt like a good sort of attention. She thought about the littlest things too: the blue crayon that might have rolled under the rug, the quiet sound the radiator made like a sleepy cough, the way the cat had batted at a ribbon and made it fly into the air. Each little thing nudged her awake again. Her chest felt small and busy, like a bird that hadn't quite remembered how to fold its wings.
She turned Moss toward her, smoothed the rabbit’s patchwork ear between her fingers, and tried to breathe the kind of slow breaths they'd practiced — in for four, hold for two, out for six — but the breaths kept breaking into numbers and lists. She remembered the warm hush of her mother’s voice when she tucked her in, the soft whisper: "If you wake, tell me." Nora had told the night and the pillow things she couldn't tell aloud. She counted the cracks in the wallpaper, counted the stars she could see through the crack of the curtains, counted the moments until she might be allowed to get up and ask for one more hug. The counting helped for a while. Then a new thought would come, small and insistent, like a pebble nudging the others: what if the blue crayon was lost forever? what if she forgot the words to the song tomorrow? what if the snake she had drawn would look sad in the morning?
Just when the room felt too full of small pricks of worry, a soft glow appeared on the windowsill.